Have you ever considered working with a placement student?
Do you consider spending some time as a placement student yourself?
In this interview with Katie Thorn and Claire Brittain, we’re exploring factors, which help to make it a win for both sides. Both have worked very well together and shared their stories.
We step into questions such as:
Listen to this interview and share it with others, who might be interested!
Further reading and useful links:
- What does the hiring process look like in the UK?
- What are the characteristics to look for in a placement student?
- What kind of projects and tasks to delegate to a placement student and how to bring the placement student up to speed?
- How working with a placement student can speed up your success as a supervisor?
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Claire Brittain
Claire has worked in medical statistics for 15 years, mostly in early-phase pharmaceuticals at GSK, Eli Lilly, and more recently UCB. After a secondment to preclinical in her GSK years she became interested in translational and methodology studies, taking pleasure from making statistics pragmatic, and putting science at the heart of any discussion. Claire has served many years on PSI CALC offering career talks/advice/workshops to children and students aged 5 to 25. She will tell you that students are never too young to learn that maths can be used for more than just finance and accounting; it can save lives. Claire has initiated statistical placement student programs at Eli Lilly and UCB and supervised students for 10+ years. She is proud of every one of them. When not at work you’ll tend to find Claire with her feet attached to a wakeboard, chasing her 3 small boys, or with a glass of rum and coke in her hand… usually not all at the same time!
Katie Thorn
Katie was first introduced to the pharmaceutical industry through her placement year which formed part of her undergraduate degree. This year encouraged her to continue studying medical statistics and ultimately return to the industry, where she has been working for the past 4 years at Eli Lilly and now GSK. Since returning to industry Katie has had the opportunity to be involved in the recruitment and supervision of placement students many of whom are now starting their careers in medical statistics.
Katie is a member of the PSI CALC committee which aims to promote and raise awareness of careers in medical statistics to students of all ages. She particularly enjoys working with schools to encourage students to study statistics at a higher level as these events usually produce the most varied and interesting questions!
Outside of work, Katie is a keen runner, cyclist, and walker, however, these are all done primarily to counteract her main love of cooking and eating.
Join The Effective Statistician LinkedIn group
This group was set up to help each other to become more effective statisticians. We’ll run challenges in this group, e.g. around writing abstracts for conferences or other projects. I’ll also post into this group further content.
I want to help the community of statisticians, data scientists, programmers and other quantitative scientists to be more influential, innovative, and effective. I believe that as a community we can help our research, our regulatory and payer systems, and ultimately physicians and patients take better decisions based on better evidence.
I work to achieve a future in which everyone can access the right evidence in the right format at the right time to make sound decisions.
When my kids are sick, I want to have good evidence to discuss with the physician about the different therapy choices.
When my mother is sick, I want her to understand the evidence and being able to understand it.
When I get sick, I want to find evidence that I can trust and that helps me to have meaningful discussions with my healthcare professionals.
I want to live in a world, where the media reports correctly about medical evidence and in which society distinguishes between fake evidence and real evidence.
Let’s work together to achieve this.
